REVIEW: Beyond: Two Souls

When I imagine what it's like sitting in a production meeting for a David Cage game, it's something like this:

"Hey! How about this guy wakes up over a bloodied corpse, with blood on his hands and strange symbols carved into his arm. He has no memory of the last 5 minutes. "

"That's great! What else?"

"Also, we could also have the detectives on the case playable characters too, so there's a conflict of interest in the player."

"Excellent! Then what happens?"

"...Uhh, well I haven't got that far yet, I don't really know how to explain our excellent premise."

"Ancient Mayan rituals and a deus ex machina to wrap it up?"

"Perfect!!!"

This happened with all three of the Quantic Dream games that were the product of David Cage. Fahrenheit - or Indigo Prophecy in North America - had an excellent premise of what I've just described with a silly ending involving Mayans performing Agent Smith moves on a roof. Heavy Rain had a child serial killer where initially the player was unsure who the killer was and there are a few - poorly handled - red herrings to try and throw us off the scent. Unfortunately the actual killer was such a twist ending that it literally did not make sense in the context of the game. 

So finally we come to David Cage's latest project. Beyond: Two Souls. it had a high pedigree of actors: Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe are among my favourite actors working today, alongside some other mediocre players that read the lines they're given with gusto. Unfortunately, for want of a better phrase, Beyond loses its shit almost from the get-go. Unlike Fahrenheit or Heavy Rain which take a while to become silly, Beyond's goes straight into bat-shit bollocks crazy almost immediately, starting with the non-linear way the story is told. I really, really wish people would stop telling stories this way unless it's necessary. It made the story disjointed, I didn't care what happened to Ellen Page's character, Jodie because I simply didn't know enough about her or her situation before or after her current predicaments and so it created a bunch of random scenes barely knitted together by the fact that Jodie is present in them. David Cage is perhaps trying to become a DJ? The sequences seem to be homages or influenced from favourite scenes in other games or movies. like one segment where Jodie is on the run from the police, and they're on a train and they manage to all get on TOP OF A MOVING TRAIN IN THE MIDDLE OF A STORM TO HAVE A FIGHT. It may look cool, but it defied explanation, context and made me lose what little immersion I had. All I could see when I played that part was executives sitting around a table saying: "I want a train chase sequence, can we have that? Fuck it, let's take them on top of the train! Wouldn't that be cool?!" No, it was not cool.

So cool!!!

There are so many plot holes in this it would be kinder to not list them all, perhaps the most insulting gimmick regardless of the plot holes is the lack of any real choice in game, and the forceful way Jodie is made to have a relationship with the character Ryan. No matter how many times I rejected him and tried to get away from this situation, the game kept pushing me against him. It felt like Jodie and Ryan were Barbie and Ken dolls held by David Cage and he was pushing their faces together and making kissy noises. The game gives you absolutely no reason to empathise or like this guy, in fact, some sequences he's made to be a total dick, like when he takes Jodie from her father figure Dafoe and forces her to join the CIA.

She should've hooked up with this dude instead

The game's "unique" gameplay gimmick is the entity Aiden, who is joined to Jodie and whom another player can control. His logic is all over the place: he can sometimes go miles and miles from Jodie, and sometimes he can barely make it out of the next room without feeling the tether. It's all about when the games wants or needs him to. Jodie's powers and Aiden's powers are also not explained very well. Jodie can maybe speak to the dead and stick ghost odour into her head to see the recent past through their eyes - although she can only do the latter power with Aiden's help. So is it Aiden with all the power? Or Jodie? Do they both share the power? It is frustratingly left unexplained by bad writing. 

I feel sorry for Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe in this. They must have been told how important video games are becoming in the world - the video game industry is worth more than the film and tv industry put together - and were hoodwinked into this shoddy, terribly written, frustratingly illogical and hammy story that makes literally no sense when you try and piece it together. The game's internal logic changes at whim to suit the story and Jodie drifts from one scene to another that are barely connected and have various different ideas at different times. I had no idea what the real story was about. Was it about the infraworld? Were the entities - described as being like Aiden - part of that world where the dead are? If Aiden is an entity like the bad ghosts, were they once humans? Why do we get Aiden's/Jodie's powers as the game progresses, but not as the linear narrative progresses? The list goes on ad nauseum.

No, I did not like this game.   

Bestfeeding

A lot of my friends and acquaintances are at that broody, let's-make-a-baby age, and as I get the inevitable updates via Facebook and other social media as pictures are posted, I notice one universal point.

Most, if not all of my younger friends have opted to use formula milk.

Formula milk is fine for babies, and there's nothing wrong with using formula milk - in fact one of my nieces had formula and she turned out into one of the funniest, most inquisitive little girls ever, but you cannot argue with nature: breast really is best.

I have to be really careful not to sound preachy or get up on a soapbox to have a rant that "breast is best", and to be fair, I haven't asked if there was even an option when it came to my friends' choices about feeding their baby. However, I do want to highlight the number of women I have come into contact with that had a choice of breast or bottle and chose the latter. For example, when on the ward after giving birth to my daughter, I was sharing it with three other women, all of which had elected to bottle feed without even attempting breast. I felt a little out of place. Another time when I went to the doctor about my daughter's jabs she was surprised when I said I was breastfeeding. These incidents started making me ask the question if there is a choice, surely it's a no-brainer? Breast milk is free, is always the right temperature, helps you lose weight and is literally developed for your baby's brain development. In fact, formula milk that has been developed from cow's milk is designed for the calf to gain weight: hence why formula babies tend to be fatter than breastfed babies. That's what thousands of years of domesticity has done to our fat farm animals.

Have we become a society where it's so disgusting to expose a breast to feed a hungry baby? Fortunately, you hear very few instances where women are asked to stop breastfeeding in public and it invariably makes national news because it is so rare, and that's a great thing. Breasts have become so over sexualised that something as harmless as a nipple makes some people snort their coffee through their nose and rant on about how we shouldn't be exposing our children to this abhorrent image - I won't make an issue of the massive irony in this train of thought. Social media definitely has a part to play in this: Facebook believes it's ok to make videos available that depict a beheading but will ban an image of a woman without a shirt? What's even more baffling is the bare breasted woman isn't even being depicted in a sexual way, yet some websites decide that a nipple is a disgusting image and is banned almost immediately. Perhaps it's because people think breasts = sex and therefore porn? People are terrified by anything to do with sex, yet breasts have little part in sex, unless you believe what you see in porn is true.

To those very few individuals that are disgusted by my breasts, I'm really glad you're in the minority, but you're damaging young mothers who you're making believe breasts are equivalent to genitalia and should cover themselves with your Victorian values. These women are afraid to breastfeed because you make them believe they're stripping off. I don't mind feeding my baby in public but I cannot help but feel exposed when I do, and I really shouldn't at all. Our society has drilled it into us that breasts are only there to be a sexual part of our bodies and we should be ashamed of exposing them like a cheap hooker.

Of course, there are some women that decide bottle is the best route to take with their baby and make an informed decision to decide to use formula, and I have absolutely nothing wrong with this, what I want to make a point of is women that decide - perhaps even before they fall pregnant - that breast was never an option to consider. This decision I'm sure has to do with the fact they're uncomfortable feeding in public and the odd belief that bottle is easier.When did this become a common thought? Bottle seems to have become the default option, which to me is weird. One of the greatest kicks I got from breastfeeding was the sheer ease of slipping my baby on my breast when she woke up in the twilight hours. Some women don't, but I really enjoyed those eerie hours with just me and my baby. It was worth trading in the few times my partner may have gotten up to do a bottle or two, that option decreasing rapidly if he had work in the morning.

This is not me hating on those mothers that bottle feed their baby: it's about the sexualisation of breasts that make women uncomfortable about breastfeeding and this wrong concept that breasts are genitalia.

...And baby makes three!

So I became a mum on the 12th of November to little Evelyn last year, hence why I haven't been able to write anything until now. In fact, as I write this my tireless partner Leo is jigging said baby on the sofa in an attempt to get her to sleep whilst she mithers relentlessly. Motherhood is tiresome, a lot more tiring than I had prepared myself for! Despite her being an incredibly chilled baby that has currently taken to sleeping through the night and was in a nice, easy routine of getting up at 12, 4 and 8 every night before that; I have no idea how parents with difficult infants deal with getting up screaming every two hours or those that struggle to breastfeed or even feed at all.



Despite the inevitable rocky road of settling into parenthood, we've hit the ground running and so far are dealing with looking after a squirming, shitting, miserable little retch who is - at times - an absolute joy and I wouldn't trade my new life for the world.

This is how she likes to sleep. Seriously.

I didn't however start this post to preach to people about how great or how difficult it is to be a new mum - there are thousands of articles about that - I did begin writing though to talk about what's been happening in the new year, hopes and aspirations and what I plan to do with the rest of my life.

...Or at least the next few months.

For February, I am overwhelmingly excited about going to Center Parcs to see Leo's enormous family and to show off our spawn to them. As she is the first grandchild on his side (number six on mine), she has been cooed over and passed around more times than I can count between his extended family already, and I'm sure that's set to continue in the coming years. I'm more excited about actually going to Center Parcs to use the facilities and to enjoy being in the company of Leo's family. I'll have to not go mad with the Prosecco this time but I'm very much looking forward to swimming in the sub-tropical paradise and hopefully even taking the little one into the baby pool for her first ever swim.

It'd better bloody fit her.

I've also taken to crocheting again now that Evelyn is getting into a bit of a makeshift routine. I just recently put the finishing touches onto a poncho for when she turns one and I'm pretty darn pleased with it. I'd like to do bigger projects than just hats and booties which is what I've been getting familiar with whilst I practised various stitches and remembering to count stitches so my work doesn't go wonky.

All in all, a good start to the year. :)
 

Qualified versus unqualified teachers

I don't usually use this blog for current events, politics or anything like that, but I watched a video yesterday that prompted me to write this piece. I don't claim to be an expert, but as someone who went through the state system of education, received a hand financially through university (because of my parents' low income, I was entitled to a grant that paid my tuition fees - I would not have been able to go to university without this help), and as a mother-to-be due in a few short days, I am concerned by the recent news about unqualified teachers, given that in a few short years I'll be back in the system with my own child.

Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, was ridiculed on Newsnight when Jeremy Paxman almost parodied of what he's best known for and repeatedly hounded Hunt with the question "would you send your children to a school with unqualified teachers?", which Hunt inelegantly dodged a total of five times. I think my problem with this entire debate is the concept of unqualified: it appears to have a double meaning, depending on who uses it. For the critics of Hunt, an unqualified teacher is someone who has spent years in the education system with an enormous subject knowledge, is well renowned and has been teaching since times of yore. These are the good guys who are being undermined by being made to sit a pointless teaching qualification in which they will learn nothing and waste money doing.

However, when I think of an "unqualified teacher", what springs to mind are the ones that have seemingly been appointed with only their subject knowledge intact and zero experience of teaching a real class of 20+ fourteen year olds. Subject knowledge is great, but a teaching qualification can teach a person to teach and handle an entire classroom of rowdy, confused teenagers and/or young children. To use myself as an example, before I went on maternity leave I worked part time as a substitute at a training provider, acting as both teaching assistant and as a Functional Skills teacher to kids of 16+. Despite having a basic teaching qualification and a degree-level subject knowledge of my chosen subject (not to mention being incredibly passionate about the English language), I really, really struggled with enthusing a group of fewer than ten kids of how I saw the joy of what you can do with a mere twenty six letters, the odd grammatical rule and several blobs of punctuation. A few months in this job made me realise how bloody hard it was to make young people as excited about something as much as I was; it gave me a real respect for teachers who do it every day of their careers with seemingly no trouble whatsoever.

So back to the main point: we have two sides of what classifies as a qualified teacher, I am very much in favour of the ones who have been in the education system for years and years and know their way around teaching their subject, but not in favour of those that can get a job teaching children with no experience in the classroom whatsoever. However, the rub is, they are both technically unqualified and therefore belong in the same tick box as "unqualified". Unfortunately, I don't really have a solution to this problem; all I can do here is rant about an seemingly unfair system and cannot provide a solution to it. All I can really contribute is that if your washing machine broke down, would you employ a plumber who has read all the books on washing machine repair but doesn't hold an appropriate qualification, or a plumber who has been fixing washing machines all their working life without that same qualification? The debate is the same for teaching, and it's the experience in the classroom that's more important than the subject knowledge.

I had many bad teachers and many good teachers through my education, and one that sticks out in particular (an English teacher of all subjects), was a teacher that knew her subject inside out, but unfortunately couldn't teach it for toffee; this led to the class resenting her, ridiculing her and eventually failing to turn up for lessons. It probably wasn't the right thing to do: especially not at 6th form level, but if a teacher fails to grab you with their enthusiasm and passion for their subject, it's very easy to stop listening to them because you don't really respect them.

It's overwhelmingly undermining for teachers that have worked to get that qualification that they're considered in the same league as those that can fall into the same profession with only subject matter and no real clue what it's like to stand in front of a room of twenty five people ready - and usually eager - to rip you to shreds if you make the slightest social faux-pas before them. Unfortunately, "unqualified" brings all those other good teachers under that umbrella who really can teach and have more experience of teaching a class than you can shake a stick at, but like I said earlier, if I knew how to rectify the situation, I probably would have already.

The Last Of Us: and why I hated the ending I saw.

Ellen...I mean uh, Ellie from The Last of Us

I'll be honest with everyone reading this: I enjoyed playing The Last Of Us, although I confess to not really liking the full ins and outs of the combat, stealth and so forth of it. This isn't the main problem I had though, It was the sloppy writing and the terrible decisions made by the developers, especially towards the end of the game. I don't know all that much about the inner workings of the video game industry, I know enough about writing and enjoying effective drama to feel really cheated and underwhelmed by the ending we were given.

To start with the very basics of good, effective writing of a story, every single story needs conflict, without conflict, you have nothing: boring people in limited situations that never change or grow and remain trapped in a stasis of arrested development. If characters don't face their inner and outer conflict, we have a story where nothing happens and you end up with a whole load of nothing. Conflict creates drama, and drama a good story makes.

Our main character, Joel, does experience plenty of conflict throughout his journey in TLOU: we see him lose his daughter and get separated from his brother, all in the middle of a zombie apocalypse - technically they're not actually zombies, they're inspired from a type of fungi that finds itself in insects, deranges them, makes them climb into a high place such as a tree and then, quite literally, grow out of the insect's corpse to release its spores and start the process over again. It's an interesting premise for an pandemic and apart from the somewhat repetitive gameplay, it seems to play well and has been praised by many critics as the game of the year.

That doesn't, however, let it off from having a really poor ending.

Back to Joel. He meets with Ellie (who bears a remarkable resemblance to Ellen Page, even more so in pre-release screenshots but yet fail to have anything to do with the actress and even though Ellen Page has since spoken publicly about it and forgiven NaughtyDog for this discretion, it's still painfully embarrassing as I'm sure most of us were hoodwinked into believing Ellen Page had something to do with Ellie's design, motion capture and voice), a young girl who has been infected but has failed to mutate. She has been hailed by those that know as a walking cure for the pandemic and Joel is reluctantly enlisted as her guardian to get her to safety to a group known as the Fireflies. A whole game later, Joel and Ellie find themselves at the Fireflies headquarters and against Joel's wishes, Ellie has been taken away from him to be prepped for surgery in order to remove the mutation in her to create a vaccine, killing her in the process. Joel, having become more than a little attached to Ellie, busts her out of there and drives away, lying to Ellie when she awakes that there were dozens of others like her and it turns out the Fireflies didn't need her anyway. Right at the end it seems Ellie doesn't quite believe him when he swears his story is the truth, and then...

...it just ends.

Woah, woah, woah, let's back up a little here. At the beginning of this article I accuse the game of leaving the characters in arrested development and not letting them grow through the various inner conflicts they experience, and indeed Joel was at first reluctant to take care of Ellie, he does indeed grow to love and need her and eventually risks his life for her ultimately; but let's look at this objectively for a moment. Ellie is never given a choice about whether she wants to sacrifice herself by the Fireflies, but by rescuing her, Joel automatically takes that choice away from her, and does the worst possible thing by lying to her about it, despite her concerns and doubts that his story is the truth. Joel acting in this way makes him an incredibly selfish character. Perhaps she would have seen the Fireflies reasoning and been totally ok with it. We'll never know of course, but the ending seems to suggest it might have been something Ellie would have wanted. She regards Joel with a sort of "I'm not sure I believe you" look when he swears his story is the truth, and looks very uncomfortable. I got the impression by her expression she would find out eventually and/or their relationship would fall apart anyway soon after.

"But he's grown!" People protest. "He's changed to love and open his heart to Ellie, who has become like a surrogate daughter to him!". It's true she cared for him in the harsh winter after a slight impaling put him out of action for a while and would have certainly killed him if not for Ellie, that still doesn't make me empathise with his decision to take her choice away to engineer a vaccine that would potentially save the entire human race. Whoever coined the phrase "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" (verbatim, it's Mr. Spock, but there are countless others in history that have expressed the same philosophy) is played with at the ending of TLOU, and then totally crapped on as Joel within 5 minutes of getting her to the Fireflies, decides because they pushed him around, that it isn't right and must save Ellie from the clutches of the evil Fireflies!

Let me remind you that the whole game, Joel has been aiming to get her to the Fireflies. It's literally the entire motivation that keeps him going. Sure Joel and Ellie bond over the year or so they're together, but if he cared about her so much, why did he keep travelling towards the Fireflies' headquarters? He's depicted as a wise-beyond-his-years, tired guy that trusts no one, so why did he not think the Fireflies would not do a thing like kill Ellie to create a cure?! Surely it must have been in his mind that to create a vaccine for the pandemic, Ellie wouldn't have got off easy: Throughout the game I had theories she would either become a baby factory or cut open for scientific reasons or to try and create a vaccine. Joel being this stupid about what would happen to Ellie angered me greatly, and again goes against his established character trait of trusting no one.

Something else about this whole surrogate daughter/interdependent relationship Joel and Ellie establish throughout the game: even after about twenty freaking years to grieve for his daughter, Joel can't talk about her and everytime she's brought up he gets all mad and bitter. Having suffered loss and grief myself, as most of us have, twenty years is more than enough time to accept one's past, and so it simply doesn't make sense to me on an emotional level that he's still so bitter and twisted about something that has happened to most people in his world, especially considering how quickly he gets over other people dying around him that he becomes close to. Joel seems to have transplanted his daughter onto Ellie, which may explain why he does what he does because "Oh I can't lose her again" kind of thinking, but it yet again hails back to his arrested development, and even after twenty years, he hasn't changed at all.

Which brings me onto my final point that bugged me about TLOU, it's a general point really, but it's worth noting. Joel is one of the most forgettable characters in media I've ever come across. He seems to tick all the boxes to make him as generic as possible: he's a white middle-aged American dude who's gruff and world-weary with a sorry past and a plaid shirt. Do we really need to play as this white American dude again? The script written for him is direly cliché when I played through there were several occasions where I managed to correctly guess exactly what Joel would say to a given situation. It's just sloppy, bad writing and given the money that was pumped into it, could - and should - have been better.

REVIEW: Deadly Premonition (2010)

This game has more layers than a club Sinner's sandwich

You all knew it was coming.

If you've been within earshot of me from the last 6 months, you'll no doubt know my current favourite game. I rate this little gem game of its year; I would even go so far as naming this game the best thing I've played in the last fifteen years. Considering the number of games I've ploughed through in that time, that's a HUGE accolade.

If you're familiar with the cult sensation Twin Peaks, this story should not surprise you: in fact it may astound you just how similar it is:

FBI Special Agent Francis York Morgan (but please, just call him York: that's what everyone calls him) has been following a rather bizarre set of murders wherein the only link was that the victim - invariably a young woman - had a stomach filled with mysterious red seeds. The trail has led him to the sleepy town of Greenvale, a small town in the north mid-west of America, where a recent high school graduate and popular local girl Anna Graham has met a similar grisly fate as the other victims. Strung up to a tree with her belly slit open, two local children find her with their grandpa, and proclaim her a Goddess of the forest. Sound familiar?

The director/creator of this game - artistic genius SWERY - poured his heart and soul into this labour of love, and my goodness does it show. The attention to detail is nothing short of incredible, and the little details added make it a truly unforgettable experience: can you name a game where if you don't eat, you die? Or if you don't change your clothes, you start to stink? How about if you don't shave, do you grow a beard? How about a living, breathing world that carries on regardless of if you're there to witness it? Plus so many other things, a juicy number of sidequests and 65 trading cards to collect, the sheer number of things to do is astounding.

I've not even got to the best bit yet. You see, York is what you might call a little idiosyncratic. He finds fortunes in his coffee, has vivid dreams with a red room and twin angels giving him cryptic clues (I'm surprised David Lynch didn't sue), and frequently speaks with an unseen entity, his best friend Zach. The Zach mechanic is nothing short of genius, where instead of SWERY forcing you to empathise and like York and invariably cause conflict and antagonism towards him, here we're his ally and his confidante. The player substitutes for York's queries to Zach, and York will follow Zach's advice first and foremost, even if it means putting off going to see the cops for the day in order to go fishing or interview residents we might deem suspicious. York will always trust Zach's instincts (after all, it is ultimately the player in control of the action!), and we're almost free to play the game how we see fit. There are deadlines and the like but we don't get punished too much for ignoring them in order to explore the town or visit the townsfolk.

I cannot say enough about this wonderful, wonderful game. The story is jaw-dropping, and packs such an emotional punch it still hits me on the forth full playthrough. York as a character is suave, smooth and cool as an ice sculpture. He is aloof and suspicious yet still extremely likable. Also, some of the cutscenes have me howling with laughter for all the right reasons.

I cannot recommend it enough, find it, buy it, borrow it, just play it!

REVIEW: The Movies (2005)

I used to be a big fan of Maxis' "The Sims", an innovative take on the simulator genre where you take control of the people inside a house you design and - depending on your mood - make their lives cushy or a living hell. I'm sure we can all recall the time we made a lesbian couple to live in the huge mansion we painstakingly fashioned over 4 hours of hard graft in build and buy mode, then trap them in the kitchen and set fire to the staff. The Sims opened a floodgate for games like it, and so we got countless other imitators leaping onto the bandwagon out of Simcity: and thus, The Movies came to be.

The Movies is a specific type of simulator, where instead of looking after the people, a household or even a neighbourhood, you control a budding movie studio starting off in 1920. Technically, it's reasonably accurate, starting off with static cameras, black and white picture and no sound; the technology of your movies expands with the timeline and you have the option to boost it with the research department.

You have to find Stars and manage their happiness by giving them entourages and trailers in accord with their celebrity. Stars and directors gain experience by working on specific genres and reviews of your movies will show you where they need improvement, which leads accordingly into The Movies' best gimmick.

By far this game's best feature is the ability to actually create movies, scene by scene. You can choose scenes, costumes, actors to do a wide variety of tricks on set, and even modify an actor's specific performance on a film. It's a laborious process but it is admittedly a great feeling to see a labour of love play out - albeit rather crudely - before your eyes.

The Movies is an interesting entry to the simulator genre, its gimmick is fresh and innovative and as I have quite a passion for early cinema and culture from the 20th century, this was a great play for me.